If you look really close you can juuuust see part of one of my pitons. Just before I got to the top of the ice cliff, I was met by one of the enemy assassins who tried to kill me by knocking my pitons out of the icy rock, which would have cause me to fall to my death. Just before the assassin knocked out the last piton, I uncliped a piton from my belt and used it as a throwing knife, injuring the assassin and sending him falling to his death instead. I was then able to infiltrate the enemy hideout.

I had an employees quit his job this week. We hired him completely unskilled and barely educated. I like to hire those as much as possible, because they need the training, work and experience the most, and we need cheap, motivated labor. We trained him to do TIG welding, a good, employable skill widely needed, and well paid. After training him we had to increase his pay, offer him plenty of overtime and give plenty of bonus pay and piece work, so that he often made twice his normal salary. Nobody has quit one of these positions voluntarily for years.

Anyway, he started to have poor attendance, so we gave him a warning about it and told him he had to stop missing work.

He said: "What do you want from me? I'm 20 years old, I don't have any bills, I live at home, I don't need much money. I don't need a job. I quit."

He had a damned good point. At least he has a good skill now, and he's better off for being with us, but he has a couple more lessons to learn. Youth is awesome.

I remember getting fired as young idiot once on my first day at a new job. I spent all day trying to paint a wall with a dried out stiff paint roller. After hours of work, I had accomplished virtually nothing good. The boss came in looked at me, looked at the wall, looked the roller, and said: "Get the hell out of here." Maybe I was stoned. I do remember thinking to myself: you idiot, why didn't you just get a new roller? I wasn't stupid - I was slow. There is a difference. I think Einstein was slow too, and I know I could kick that Stephen Hawking's ass in a painting race.

Hey Bag, I just finished reading Eat the Rich by P.J. O'Rourke and this sentence, uttered in 1961 by one John Cowperthwaite, financial secretary of Hong Kong, made me think of you as a business owner [which may or may not indicate I'm reading too much Althouse lately, if I'm thinking about all y'all when I'm not here]:

"...in the long run the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgement in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster."

I remember getting fired as young idiot once on my first day at a new job. I spent all day trying to paint a wall with a dried out stiff paint roller.

I remember the first time I tried to paint something with a dried-out, stiff paint roller. It was in the summer between my third-grade and fourth-grade year, and my dad spanked me for it--because he'd told me which one I was supposed to use (which I didn't), and also because I'd been taught how to clean brushes and rollers a couple of years before, and therefore was expected to know better in any case.

He was right. I was being lazy. In terms both of the work AND of the rebelling. Not a leg to stand on did I have. I deserved the spanking. In that case.

For somebody with such a thin skin (and the intellect to match), the She Devil of the SS should refrain from combat, given how short she is on witty ripostes.

And, yes, you do remind one of the women who got off on the gladiatorial games in the way you enjoy watching one of your antagonists attacked by someone else, although you seem to have imbued yourself with the methodology of the SS when they went into a new territory - they never shipped out the Jews themselves, they whipped up a mob of the locals to do it for them.

That is very true about small businessmen, which I never imagined I'd become before it just kind of happened. I think I was one for years before I actually noticed that's what I do. Kind of like prostitution.

Anyway, the thing that bugs me so much about taxes, and the point I often make is that I know that anyone who takes a few minutes to think about it, could come up with a dozen better uses for their money than sending it to the government. I mean anyone, but businessmen do that all day long for a living. They think about what resources they have, and how to best turn them into long term gain. To end up better off, at the lowest loss of resources. They often have altruistic motives, but never want to waste what takes so much effort and luck to acquire. They have to get crerative and often abandon sacred cows. It is almost the opposite of a government, tax-funded mentality.

We sell manufacturing to the government, and I can't believe how many people get involved, how many steps, and how much useless paperwork and time it takes to do anything.

An example: We are cutting some large art panels out of thick steel that will adorn a new government building in L.A.. They hired an artist, an architect, involved engineers, and accountants to get this job done. The artist sent us a picture of a tree, and said this is the art work for it, the engineers sent drawings of how and where it would go, the architect drew what it would look like on the building, and the accountant decided how much to spend.

By the time it was done two of my high school educated people had to redo the artwork, all the drawings, and reengineer the whole idea, program it and cut it - two 20 somethings with no college. We did it for half of what they were willing to pay, and that was after a healthy mark up. The artist simply sent a photo she found in a magazine, and I assume was well paid for the effort. 90% of the time it took to do it (over a year) was waiting for paperwork to be approved through endless committee meetings on their end. This is always the way it goes. With a private sector customer it would have taken a few weeks, and cost about 1/3 as much. I know this is how most of our tax money gets spent, and it drives me nuts.

Thanks for the kudos, Meade. I know you did similar stuff, and know what it's like to help someone along like that. Even when they don't realize it yet, it's still very rewarding to give them a little traction out of the starting gate.

I know what you're up to. This is the strange Lutheran thing, isn't it? Stranger even than what the Mormons get up to. It's why you guys are oddly so cool and taciturn about this time of year, the most joyous of all for the promise it holds and for its demonstration of life eternal.

Anyway, the thing that bugs me so much about taxes, and the point I often make is that I know that anyone who takes a few minutes to think about it, could come up with a dozen better uses for their money than sending it to the government.

Pogo,Me, too. Though I am my own employer, I worry about the direction reimbursement is taking with the ACO model and so-called "patient centered medical home." I don't have a flair for self-promotion, don't really believe in many of the treatments of "integrative medicine," and as a solo doctor am not large enough to negotiate with insurance companies. I am thinking I might give up on medicine completely or do international locum tenens.

Pisses you off, to have gubmint penpushers take away all you have worked for.

The lefties I work with are bewildered by the changes so far. One was told, when he was bitching about having to see more and more patients just to keep up, "We'll, you voted for it, now you are finding out what was in it."

Mark Wahlberg is a devout Roman Catholic who attends daily Mass, and has a rosary tattooed around his neck, both of which I approve. He did a lot of really ugly stuff as a teenager and I am happy that he has reconciled that through God's grace.

Bag--it wasn't until I lived on an overseas military base with a husband who was up close and personal with all the base finances that I started to realize that maybe the government wasn't so great at handling money or getting things done properly, and maybe my unthinking faith in it wasn't entirely warranted. I don't understand how anyone can work closely with government accounting and administration and then say, "Yes, more of that would be awesome! Let's put them in charge of health care!"